Disraeli: Or, the Two Lives

‘All actors want to play Disraeli, except fat ones,’ the American
filmmaker Nunnally Johnson said. ‘It’s such a showy part – half Satan,
half Don Juan, man of so many talents, he could write novels, flatter
a queen, dig the Suez Canal. Present her with India. You can’t beat
that, it’s better than Wyatt Earp.’ And it’s as good as Lord Byron.
Take the life of Disraeli, for ‘novelist’ read ‘poet’, and you’ve got
an epic about what happened to Byron after he’d recovered from that
deadly fever at Missolonghi.